On 09/17/2005 09:32 AM, Michael Torrie wrote:
On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 09:36 -0600, Tyler Strickland wrote:
> ...
Fortunately, since moving from RedHat 9 to Debian a few years ago,
dependency hell has been a rare thing, and when it does happen it's
generally easy to fix. Back in the RedHat days, though... The day my
distaste for RPM's reached its peak was the day I had to download a
package from CPAN to satisfy an RPM dependency. I have had no desire to
run an RPM-based distrobution since then. Ich. Just thinking about it
gives me chills.
I guess I'm a weird one then. I have had an order of magnitude worse
dependency hell with debian than any redhat distro. Invariably I want
something newer than a package that debian has, but when I try to switch
repositories and upgrade it, I run into all sorts of dependency
problems. Compounded with the fact that on different platforms the
debian packages may or may not be stable (sparc support for unstable was
spotty for example). On my linode I wanted to upgrade to apache 2 and
php 4.3 (over a year ago), and trying to accomplish this with debian was
a nightmare. I've since switched to RHEL (CentOS).
Yes, managing several repositories together can be tricky - my server
has a mix of packages from testing, unstable, and my own make. Learning
to make everything happy has been an interesting (and sometimes
frightening) journey, but definately an educational one. Fortunately
I've been relatively free of package management problems once I learned
how to balance everything.
No wonder you hate RPMs so much. You can't possibly satisfy an RPM
dependency with a CPAN package. Things are much better there now that
someone has build a standardized build system to convert CPAN packages
to RPMS. For the last 2 years I've found 99.99 percent of everything I
needed for FC from one of the 4 apt/yum repositories I use.
Sadly, the CPAN download did work to satisfy the dependency. It was
gnucash, I believe, that pulled that little trick on me... :( I'm glad
to hear that with yum things are better - I did use apt-rpm back in the
day but it was still a bit touchy. If you did a forced install on
something (ignoring a dependency, etc), your package management system
stopped working until you rectified the "problem". Admittedly, I have
had issues with apt in debian on occasion, but never to the degree that
I experienced in RH.
Dependency hell is definitely not a redhat phenomena. *Any* package
system whether it be dpkg or rpm will suffer from it. How bad the
symptoms are depends on how well the packages are maintained.
Fortunately FC these days does a very good job at this. As far as I can
tell dpkg === rpm. Only Gentoo's approach seems in any way novel.
Ideally the package system should be able to look at the entire system
and take into account files from any source (dpkg, rpm, cpan, or from
source) and try to solve it. Of course that is probably NP complete.
Very true. I'd love to see a package management system that worked
between distros and versions - another aspect of RPM's that I disliked
was the requirement to have a different RPM for every version of every
distro that used RPM's. I imagine Debian will start seeing the same
problem, to a degree, with Ubuntu, but thus far I haven't had issues.
Admittedly, Gentoo has intrigued me over the years, but the thought of
the time involved with compiling everything from source has thus far
deterred me.
Could it be that someday we'll reach a wonderful place where a
programmer just has to make one package and all the distros will
recognize it and work with it? Oh, well. One can dream. Gentoo's
probably the closest to that goal, but somehow I doubt many other
distros are likely to get excited about source-based packaging.
--Tyler
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